Science proves definitively that modern movies suck

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Case closed, guys. The trolls win. Say what you like about digital filming and the democratization of the medium — the science is in, and it doesn’t look good.

According to a recent study published in Nature Scientific Reports the more modern a movie is, the less creative it will generally be. Oh well, there’s always videom games.

If you’d like evaluate these findings for yourself, though, the methodology is actually pretty interesting. The researchers used the 2 million-film database from IMDB to generate a creativity score between one and zero for each. By plotting the creativity score over time, we can see a direct relationship between time and creativity.

This all-important score comes based on the language used by IMDB users. A term, for instance “anti-hero,” would be considered novel around the time of its introduction since it wouldn’t exist beforehand; the spike in frequency of use corresponds to the introduction of the concept, and thus to creative film making. The same term used on a movie five years later would receive a lower creativity score for that term, since it was established and thus less creative.

Twelve Angry Men: A REAL movie.

The obvious problem with this measure is that it doesn’t measure movies at all, but rather how we talk about movies. All the comments used in the study were left in the past decade or less, even movies that came out in the 40’s and 50’s; with the benefit of hindsight we can look back and identify the trends produced by old movies, since we’ve had so long to digest and discuss its long term impacts. A more modern movie could be just as influential, but if we haven’t gotten a chance to see that we’ll be less likely to use the corresponding language.

Additionally, what we see in the oldest movies is not so much innovation within film but the invention of modern film in the first place. It’s a bit unfair the compare a movie from the 50’s to one from today in terms of tradition-breaking; in the 50’s, there was simply far more unexplored space to mine, and far more entrenched traditions to eschew.

That said, the model does find periods of low creativity within thevenerated history of film, such as during the Golden Age of Hollywood which ran from roughly 1930-1950. By finding that this studio-stifled time was low on innovation (an opinion also held by many film history buffs) the model has validated itself, at least a little.

Still, science has spoken, guys. It’s time to ditch the Netflix subscription in favor of a Criterion Collection boxed set.